Honest question. Do you think the GNOME project is as healthy today as it was, say, 4 years ago? Benjamin Otte explains that no, it isn't. GNOME lacks developers, goals, mindshare and users. The situation as he describes it, is a lot more dire than I personally thought.

You can apply that logic also, for example, to XFCE when it wins the Linux Desktop race but you happen to be WindowManager fan.

Android is a Linux based opensource product. You can take it, change it, remove/add/edit code and redistribute when you are not happy about whatever.

Face it, Android is "us" and you have the freedom to make it "me" by e.g. forking. Do it if you like but not complain if you don't. If you rather like to work on a compitor then, by all means, do that but not complain "Android is not we" when your compitor does not gain similar marketshare since what you really mean is "Android is not my invention" what is a huge difference.

Uh, no, not really. XFCE is developed by a group of volunteers, who seem to want to build a pretty good desktop environment. Android is developed by Google, who want to know everything there possibly is to know about you so they can make money for their shareholders by selling ads.

I'll take the volunteers over the corporate overlords any day of the week.

Oh, and while I write some code for work now and then, to think that me, or most of the people who use Android could possibly fork the code and manage a distribution with all the data mining cleaned out, well, that's just absurd.

I'd even take MS over Google when it comes to desktop operating systems, at least MS is watched to closely to get away with anything. Everyone just trusts Google as they sit back and watch everything you do.